Citation

Contents

Author

Context

Thesis

to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

- THE ODD THING about literary “realism” is that it is not a descriptive term at all, but a period: roughly 1830–1895,
-Many classics of 19th-century realism would be conspicuously ruled out if plausibility were any criterion.
-realism becomes, in the folk vocabulary of everyday criticism, simply “the way that we used to do things.”
-This realism was supposedly built on “the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.”
-But there wasn't subjective plenitude, characters were neurotic, Dickens characters were trager of economic roles. 
-Realism is not a cultural logic, but instead multitasking, Realism was instead a period of uneasy transition between two types of narrative: the traditional forms of storytelling like the Bible or medieval romance, and new strategies for describing experience and sensation which were emerging in the 19th century. This struggle between showing vs. telling also had to do with the effort to illuminate historical processes: the attempt to make sense of the social world on the one hand, and the attempt to fully describe personal sensory experience and habits of mind on the other. The harsh truths of life vs. intense self-awareness.  It is more helpful to think about realism not as the unmistakeable presence of a set of classic features, but as an open-ended compromise, a tension arising between these narrative approaches.
- to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.
-realism consisted of a number of ambitious deployments and maneuvers to outflank the stalemated face-off between narration and description, story and scene. 
-Realism’s antinomies are parsed in terms of three such unrepresentable projections: providence, war, and “staging our own present as historical.” All of these are untellable visions, but they have in common the collective that Utopia gropes to construct. Also, the titanic stature of Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be accounted for anew, as a book that tries to straddle all three straits: to be a historical novel about war, capped by a theory of historical causality.
"Jameson’s two poles of realism, the registering of affect and the unique destiny, suggest another (unmentioned) recent work: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. All of the techniques of Scientology represented — the wall-touching, the unblinking confessional, the various tests of endurance, the states of inebriation — are certainly apparatuses of bodily specification and the discrimination of intensities; while the religious cult and its insertion into a thoroughly “periodized” (Hopper-esque) Americana evoke all of the problems of a collectivity (“The Cause”) and its emergence. The Master ignites all of these Jamesonian nodes — by way of L. Ron Hubbard’s own authorial proclivities, one could even make a connection to science fiction!"
- If there is to be, in Jameson’s phrase “realism after realism,” it will have to mean reclaiming motivation and decisions and the tracing of explanations, in whatever mode available, which will probably have to be invented.